 In San Francisco for the 2009 LSA Annual Meeting |
Tamara Nicol Medina Post-Doctoral Fellow Institute for Research in Cognitive Science University of Pennsylvania 3401 Walnut Street, Suite 400A Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228 Phone: 215.898.0327 CV (Updated September 5, 2011) |
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Research Interests |
My research focuses on the acquisition of language: how children acquire the meanings of words (lexical semantics) and how they learn to use and understand these words in phrases and sentences (syntax). I study the structure of the adult grammar in order to inform hypotheses about the nature of the target language that the child is acquiring, and I investigate the cognitive biases and learning strategies that children bring to the task of language learning. I make use of computational modeling techniques to formalize my hypotheses about the process of acquisition, and I employ methods of experimental psychology to test these hypotheses.
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Downloadable Papers and Presentations |
Medina, Tamara Nicol; Hafri, Alon; Trueswell, John; & Gleitman, Lila R. 2010. Propose but Verify: Fast Mapping meets Cross-Situational Word Learning. (ppt) Paper presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development (BUCLD) Annual Meeting, Boston, MA, Nov. 5. |
Medina, Tamara Nicol; Trueswell, John; Snedeker, Jesse; & Gleitman, Lila R. 2009. Using Extra-Linguistic Cues to Identify the Good Word Learning Instances. (ppt) Paper presented at the SRCD Bi-Annual Meeting, Denver, CO, Apr. 2. |
Medina, Tamara Nicol; Trueswell, John; Snedeker, Jesse; & Gleitman, Lila R. 2009. Rapid Word Learning Under Realistic Learning Conditions. (ppt) Paper presented at the LSA Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA, Jan. 9. |
Medina, Tamara Nicol. 2008. Probabilistically Ranked Constraints: Derivation of the Gradient Grammaticality of Implicit Objects. (ppt) Poster presented at the LSA Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL, Jan. 5. |
Medina, Tamara Nicol. 2007. Learning when (and when not) to omit objects in English. (ppt) Invited Talk, presented at the Psicolingüística e Teoria Lingüística: Tentativas de diálogo (Workshop), Departmento de Lingüística, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, Brazil. August 13, 2007. |
Medina, Tamara Nicol. 2007. Gradient grammaticality of indefinite implicit objects in English. (ppt) Invited Talk, presented at the Departmento de Lingüística, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Campinas, Brazil. August 15, 2007. |
Medina, Tamara Nicol. 2007. Learning which verbs allow object omission: Verb semantic selectivity and the implicit object construction. (doc) Dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. |
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Updated: January 9, 2011 |